Melody is refusing to let her husband’s new family bully her or her children.

Melody was committed to Jeff for 13 years until he became abusive, started an affair, and began stealing her money. When she decided to end the marriage, he threatened to seize her home unless she agreed to joint custody of their children.

13 years had passed. 13 years, 2 children, and one giant mortgage in Visitacion Valley. Melody and Jeff shared all of it. It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes Jeff got angry and violent, but Melody was committed.

Then Jeff started an open affair. Her name was Aileen. Melody knew, because sometimes Aileen would send her text messages that read, “I will kill you. You don’t know you are messing with. You need to be careful.” Melody was careful. She allowed Jeff to go his own way, brought her kids over to visit, and generally stayed out of their way.

One afternoon when she brought the kids over to visit, Melody found Jeff drunk and angry. Scared for her kids’ safety, she confronted him. In retaliation, he tackled her, grabbed her neck, and pushed her to ground, tearing her jeans and scraping her elbows in the process. He then ran out of the room, allowing her to call the police. When the police arrived, they seized his guns and put him in jail. Much to Melody’s dismay, Jeff was released the next day. She immediately filed for a restraining order and was granted a temporary order. Unfortunately, the Sheriff refused to serve the order, so it never became effective.

Less than a month later, Melody was diagnosed with cancer and had a complete hysterectomy. Much to her surprise, Jeff started a GoFundMe page to help pay her medical bills and raised about $14,000 in the process. When the campaign ended, however, he only gave her $2,000 from it. He said he needed the money to pay the IRS. That was the final straw. Melody decided to begin filing for a divorce. When Jeff heard this, he threatened to seize their home unless she granted him joint custody of their children.

Melody is now working with our attorneys to make sure none of Jeff’s threats come true. Will you help us make sure that Melody can keep her home, maintain sole custody of her children, and fully separate from the man who abandoned her long ago?

Philip Green

Belinda Liu

Sil Liapis

Elder Law Attorney

(415) 610-5991
sil@opendoorlegal.org

Hannah Wischnia

Engagement Associate

(415) 906-0578
hannah@opendoorlegal.org

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Our Story

Our organization started when we realized that it was in fact possible to ensure universal access to civil representation for everyone. For years, we had watched existing legal aid nonprofits turn away more people than they helped. We had seen the government grossly underfund legal aid and attach ever-more restrictions on who could be helped. We had witnessed the private sector invest atrociously little of its accumulated wealth into legal aid.

The result of this is predictable: legal aid has become the least resourced social need in the United States. Most low and moderate-income Americans can’t get help, and as a result can’t properly enforce their rights.

We realized that by combining program innovations, new strategies for generating earned income, and a focus on fundraising from the general public we could create a system that solved this massive problem and guaranteed access to legal representation for everyone in a community, on every issue.

We decided to prototype this system in Bayview/Hunters Point because it was the only high-need neighborhood of San Francisco without a legal aid office in the neighborhood. In late 2012 we raised about $8,000 in seed funding from some generous private donors and decided to put our theories to the test.

We opened our doors on January 7th, 2013. In our first year, our core staff worked tirelessly on minimum wage to deliver services to dozens of clients. The heating in the office didn’t work, the furniture was rotten, and we couldn’t afford a receptionist. We had to scrounge office supplies and equipment from people we knew.

But we proved that our model could work. We never turned away someone for services who lived in the local community, and by rigorously tracking our outcomes we were able to get more and more support from people that hadn’t funded legal aid before. We tripled our budget between our first and second year and tripled it again in our third year.

We’ve come a long way since the days when we had to hand shred everything because we couldn’t afford a shredder. We’re excited by what the future can bring and look forward to growing our model out to encompass more and more people.

Our Board of Directors

We are proud to have a diverse board featuring local residents and professionals from a variety of different industries. The board is in charge of implementing the member-approved annual budget and overseeing our staff.